It is likely that your brand is increasingly devoting budget to online marketing initiatives. Creating an online style guide is the first step to ensuring these initiatives are well aligned with and properly reflect your overall brand.

Your style guide can vary depending upon the size of your organization and the sophistication of your marketing department, but at a minimum it should specify rules around items such as:

• font (html and images with type)
• colors
• image treatment
• content block treatment (specifically defining headers, table row data format)
• spacing
• most importantly-- how your brand identity should be used in different online channels (website/intranets, emails, banners, mobile, et cetera).

If your agencies need to collaborate and work within the same files, then you may also consider defining naming conventions, global CSS usage and even directory structure.

Depending on your budget and level of complexity you can easily distribute your style guide via PDF. However, if budgets allow, creating a micro-site and keeping it updated can ensure not only the agencies and your organization are well informed, but more importantly the production resources can reference and search for what they need via the web more easily.